NVIDIAs TBA DX11 Driver will be better than Mantle

If we can believe the slides of course. Over at GDC Nvidia has been discussing the upcoming DX12 API and the DX11 state in terms of gaming. At the event NVIDIA has been showing several slides with benchmarks that show how the company has improved efficiency of their graphics cards in several DirectX 11 titles and still aiming to deliver more improvements through driver updates.

While showing the driver to driver improvement, these benchmarks also show something very very interesting. They show AMD’s Mantle API faring worse than NVIDIA counterparts, on DX11. That’s right, not DX12 but DX11 through driver updates.

Here's the skinny from wccftech:

There are three drivers mentioned in this article. The first one is the R331 Driver, the second is the R334 Driver and the last is an upcoming Driver.

We see a clear speed increase going from the R331 drivers to the R334 Drivers but it is with the new upcoming Driver that performance of the Nvidia cards overtake those of their counterparts with Mantle API. Now according to the slides the Test Rig was running Windows 7 on an i7-3930K and 8GB worth of RAM. The first relevant slide shows two applications being tested. One is the Star Swarm demo, which you may remember showed a massive increase in performance with Mantle as compared to Direct3D. The Second is the recently released Thief, which once again showed a significant performance increase with Mantle API.

Now the first benchmark Star Swarm has a normal axis ranging from 0 till 80 and we see continuously increasing performance with the Nvidia Counterparts. We see that the R9 290X gets a massive bump in performance with Mantle API but that performance is neared by the R334 Driver enabled GTX 780 Ti and overtaken by the up coming Driver enabled GTX 780 Ti.

The performance gap is pretty significant seeing that this is just a Soft update of the same card. Now the Thief benchmark have a skewed axis starting from 48 fps till 60 fps, so the performance increase is lower (percent wise) than star swarm. However we can see that the GTX 780 Ti overtakes the Mantle Equipped R9 290X once again in terms of performance, with this mysterious new update. This second slide shows some impressive improvements of API features that once again come in this new upcoming driver update.

This is undeniably one of the most impressive charts i have ever seen. The Benchmark pits Mantle Equipped R9 290X against all three drivers. The new driver is very impressive, increasing performance by orders all around. We see an increase of an order of magnitude in DirectDraw.If these benchmarks are true, and it looks like they are, it reveals why Nvidia didn’t bother creating a rival API to Mantle but instead increased optimized their graphics card for the DirectX 11 API in a way that performance can be obtained from a simple driver update. Now the golden question that comes to my mind is this: If Nvidia could do all this with a Soft update, why didn’t it do it before. The obvious answer to that question is slightly alarming.Advertisements

In another slide, NVIDIA has shown the performance scaling between GPUs and CPUs showcasing that the Single precision performance in GeForce GPUs has increased tremendously over the past four years with GeForce GTX 780 Ti pumping almost 5.5 TFLOPs of performance compared to Ivy Bridge which barely cross the 500 GLOPs barrier. The AMD Kaveri APU manages to do 856 GFlops but its still a mighty length behind the graphics units. Similar, the total bandwidth on GeForce GPUs has increased to 336 GB/s as opposed to 60 GB/s on Ivy Bridge. Broadwell is supposed to feature Crystalwell eDRAM which will increase bandwidth to around 100 GB/s but nothing compared to GPUs.

#4787810 Posted on: 03/24/2014 09:12 AM
Well time will tell but i think its possible

Spets
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#4787814 Posted on: 03/24/2014 09:24 AM
Can't wait

Noisiv
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#4787816 Posted on: 03/24/2014 09:24 AM
Come on Mr. Hilbert, that sounds almost like baiting now

It's pretty crazy that even at this stage there are still basic functions that can be significantly improved at Kepler.

I always thought basics had been covered long time ago, and only game specific optimizations are left on the table.

Mantle will still have lower overhead; NV knows better than to make hard to keep promises.

Segamon
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#4787820 Posted on: 03/24/2014 09:27 AM
"Now the golden question that comes to my mind is this: If Nvidia could do all this with a Soft update, why didn’t it do it before. The obvious answer to that question is slightly alarming."

indeed. I feel the time for the gaming industry to witness some significant changes is near.

V@IO
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#4787824 Posted on: 03/24/2014 09:33 AM
I hope this turns-out to be true. This would be a "worthy" driver indeed.

#4787838 Posted on: 03/24/2014 10:10 AM
I get the feeling that anycard can do 10% better now. They just holding it back to make it slightly faster than radeon cards but I remember AMd rave about their Mantle and in the end it was not as good as they said it should be.

I want to see how mantle vs directx compares in crossfire vs sli systems with lower end cpu's. I bet mantle will scale better.

will a gtx550 also benefit from this?

kosh_neranek
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#4787839 Posted on: 03/24/2014 10:14 AM
That's what competition does, with the advent of Mantle, Nvidia was forced to come up with some kind of counter solution. So thank AMD for releasing Mantle.

Well that's my take on it anyway.

We can all just sepculate.Naturally all this is business and I think both
AMD&Nvidia are guilty for not trying to improve before. As it seems they
both have been working on DX12 with M$ for 4 years now.So they knew
what's coming.Only somebody in AMD got this "great" idea of pushing
Mantle before DX12 will take off in hope of bringing up sales. Now I know
that a lot of game creators have jumped on it, but if nvidia can bring
something similiar just by drivers I really don't think Mantle will have
future after DX12 unless AMD has money to pay game creators big time

meth curd
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#4787846 Posted on: 03/24/2014 10:21 AM
loving this if it's true. hopefully mantle will be able to play catchup so we can push the tech more

thatguy91
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#4787847 Posted on: 03/24/2014 10:21 AM
Since the R334 driver is currently available, I guess an easy thing to do would be to compare the 290x (Catalyst 14.3 b1) on Mantle in Star Swarm, and the 780 Ti on Directx 11 in Star Swarm.

Why is this a fair comparison? On the slides presented by Nvidia, the 780 Ti performs just ever so fractionally slower. It this is true, then the new driver info may have some merit as long as the performance increase doesn't come as a result of quality reduction.

Proves big point. Nvidia doesn't want to beat AMD by huge margin, but only to stay competitive. Mantle forced their hand, seem's they probably have been sitting on this kinda performance update until required.